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2 Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition Quickstart

CreditsAuthor and Quickstart Developer: Satyros Phil Brucato

Mage: The Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition Developer: Satyros Phil Brucato

Creative Director: Richard Thomas

Editor: David A. Hill, Jr. and Rose Bailey

Art Direction and Design: Mike Chaney

Art: Brian Leblanc, Larry McDougal, Mike Gaydos, Jeff Laubenstein

© 2014 CCP hf. All rights reserved. Reproduction without the written permission of the publisher is expressly forbidden, except for the purposes of reviews, and for blank character sheets, which may be reproduced for personal use only. White Wolf, Vampire, World of Darkness, Vampire the Masquerade, and Mage the Ascension are registered trademarks of CCP hf. All rights reserved. Vampire the Requiem, Werewolf the Apocalypse, Werewolf the Forsaken, Mage the Awakening, Promethean the Created, Changeling the Lost, Hunter the Vigil, Geist the Sin-Eaters, V20 Companion, Children of the Revolution, Storyteller System, and Storytelling System are trademarks of CCP hf.

All rights reserved. All characters, names, places, and text herein are copyrighted by CCP hf.

CCP North America Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of CCP hf.

This book uses the supernatural for settings, characters, and themes. All mystical and supernatural elements are fiction and intended for entertainment purposes only. This book contains mature content. Reader discretion is advised.

Check out White Wolf online at http://www.white-wolf.com and check out the Onyx Path at http://www.theonyxpath.com

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3Table of Contents

Mage 20th Anniversary Quickstart 5You Change Your World 5

The Game 5

Factions and Sects 5

Characters, and the Things They Can Do 7

Rules of the Game 8

Dice Pools, and Rolling the Dice 9

Combat Rules 10

The Health Chart 12

Healing Damage 12

Armor and Shields 12

General Hand-to-Hand Maneuvers 13

Dirty-Fighting Maneuvers (min. three dots in Brawl) 13

Ranged Combat Maneuvers 13

Melee Weapons 14

Melee Weapons (Continued) 15

Ranged Weapons 16

Magick Rules 17

Paradox Points Generated 18

Paradox Backlash Roll 18

The Spheres 19

Effects 19

Damage or Duration 20

Correspondence Sphere Ranges 20

Spirit Sphere Gauntlet Ratings 20

Time Sphere Timelines 21

Feats of Time Magick 21

Toll for the Trolls 23The Cabal 24

Squats, Gigs and Scams 24

Khan Salvatore 25

Synder 28

Chopper 31

Jinx 33

Sabra 35

The Family Dogs 38

Spirit Entities 38

Neutral Parties 42

Antagonists 44

Story Hooks 45

Table of Contents

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4 Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition Quickstart

I tell you this: We are Divinity.

Reality is ours to bend. To subvert. To command.

We have that power – all of us.

Not everyone knows what to do with it, or uses it well. Most of us never

realize just what it is we are or how much we can do.

Those of us who do… well, some of us are monsters. Manipulators.

Parasites. Tyrants. Fanatics. And the rest of us never see that monster

in our own mirror, only in the reflections of those folks who are not “us.”

Here’s the truth, though: We are ALL “us.” We are ALL gifted,

We can ALL change the world.

Most of us remain asleep.

A blessed few Awaken.

Fewer still use that power wisely.

And none without consequences.

And so, reality is up for grabs.

Where do you stand?

And will you Fall… or Ascend?

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5The Game

You Change Your WorldIf you had the power of a god, what would you do with it? And what would it do to you?

That question provides the heart of Mage: The Ascension, a Storytelling game about reality on the brink of change. In Mage, players take on the roles of people who have Awakened to their innate power to change the world. That rare gift forces them to confront their place in that world, and to face other people who might not be as kind or careful about the things they do.

Despite their power, every mage is a flawed human being, with all the fears, doubts and passions each one of us confronts in our everyday world. For a mage, however, belief – backed up by luck, skill and judgment – can transcend mortal limitations. By learning the Spheres, a mage can juggle elements of reality… and by gaining Arete – “excellence” – that person can become a greater force for change and expand his or her effects upon the world.

That power, of course, has a cost: the delusions of pride, the lure of power, and the effects of Paradox, the backlash that occurs when several versions of “reality” collide. No mage remains immune to those forces, and every mage must confront the limits of Awakening… often losing battles even if they win the war.

Mage, ultimately, is about people who believe in something so deeply that they change the world. Those changes can be dangerous, even fatal… but they’re better than remaining a pawn in someone else’s game.

ThemeBecause the power of a mage’s Arts can alter reality through

the power of Will, Mage’s primary theme is simple: Reality is flexible, and at your command. That “command” isn’t easy, or cheap, or perfect, but it’s possible… and in a world where we so often feel like we’re stuck dancing to someone else’s tune, that possibility does feel magical.

In Mage, such “magic” is spelled with a “k” at the end. Why? Because, to quote master occultist Aleister Crowley, magick is “the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity to the will,” spelled as it is to “distinguish the science of the Magi from all of its counterfeits.” Other spellcasters use limited forms of “magic”; only a mage, however, can rework reality on a metaphysical level. That’s a risky pursuit, but the ability to change the world is often worth the price.

MoodMage’s world is grim, part of a larger World of Darkness.

And yet, for a mage, there’s always hope. The power to change reality gives mages a great advantage in this dangerous world, and so the overriding mood in any Mage game involves optimism rather than despair.

Despair, though, is the flipside of hope, and so Mage games (also known as chronicles) ride along the edge of despair as well. The prices of magick can be high: madness, death, corruption and damnation. A Mage character, then, exists on the thin edge of hope and horror – an edge that the gutter-mages within this quickstart booklet understand all too well.

The Bridge Troll CabalPower exists in unlikely places. And so this quickstart

introduction to the epic world of Mage features an unlikely pack of mages: the Bridge Troll Cabal, a “family” of gutter mystics whose life in the underside of Seattle, Washington, contrasts with the vibrant face of that city. Drawn from broken homes and tragic catastrophes, these mages protect their own weird little corner of the world. For the moment, they exist outside the vast intrigues of the greater Ascension War. Yet depending on their choices, that isolation might not last for long…

The details of the Bridge Troll Cabal can be found later in this booklet, after a summary of Mage’s setting and basic rules.

The GameMage: The Ascension presents 21st-century miracle-workers and the conflicts they endure. Divided, more often than not, into factions based on magic, faith, science and insanity, these “mages” wage a shadowy “Ascension War” over the different visions of reality they seek. Some follow the crafts of classical mysticism, embracing the ways of True Magick and its crosscurrents in Enlightened Science. Others strive to govern the world through hypertech disciplines, weeding out the “reality deviants”

who threaten humanity’s survival. Handfuls of them pursue

demented visions of Descent and madness, corrupting the world or tearing it apart at the seams. And many others – often referred to simply as orphans because they lack “parental guidance” – exist between the cracks, seeking Enlightenment and power wherever they can find it. Players take on the roles of these characters, and the game revolves around their struggles in that world.

Factions and SectsThe many factions and sects of the Awakened world weave

a complicated dance through the setting of Mage. Even so, four factions stand out most clearly:

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6 Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition Quickstart

• The Council of Nine Mystic Traditions, an embattled fellowship of sorcerers, witches, unorthodox technicians, and other devotees of esoteric orders. Bitter enemies of the Technocratic Union, they appear to have been losing the battle for reality.

• The Technocratic Union or Technocracy, a ruthless hypertech consortium that strives for control over an increasingly chaotic world. Dedicated to wiping out Reality Deviants, they’ve spent over 500 years at war with the mystic Traditions.

• The Nephandi, a subversive network of nihilistic corrupters. Existing on the fringes of the other factions, this group commands a terrifying degree of influence within the modern World of Darkness.

• The Marauders, a loose confederation of metaphysical schizophrenics. Through rare and disorganized, these mages carry personal bubbles of “psychotic reality” wherever they go.

These four groups jockey for domination in a struggle for Earthly reality, and their struggles have echoed throughout human history, most especially within the last half-millennium.

For the most part, Mage characters come from within either the Traditions or the Technocratic ranks. Other mystic sects exist outside of these factions… many more, as it turns out, than the average mage realizes. These four factions, however, make up the bulk of that so-called Ascension War, and carry its conflicts into all aspects of the Awakened world… and, in many regards, into the mundane world as well.

The Nine TraditionsSeeking a return to the days of High Magick, or a new dawn

of mystic potential, the mystics within these nine Traditions personify the word “mage.”

• The Akashayana: Masters of mind, body and spirit, this “Brotherhood” pursues the Arts of personal discipline.

• The Celestial Chorus: Sacred singers who give a human Voice to the Divine Song, the Chorus magi nurture humanity and embody holy grace.

• The Chakravanti, or Euthanatoi: Disciples of mortality who purge corruption and bring merciful release from suffering, these “death mages” struggle with an ominous reputation and their sacred duty to the Cycle of Being.

• The Cult of Ecstasy, or Sahajiya: Visionary seers who transcend limitations through sacred experience, the members of this “Cult” expand perceptions, physics and time itself through their path of sacred excess.

• The Dreamspeakers, or Kha’vadi: Preservers and protectors of both the Spirit Ways and the Earthly cultures

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7Characters and the Things They Can Do

that have been looted, abandoned and oppressed, these mystics mix timeless Arts with postmodern insight and righteous anger.

• The Order of Hermes: Rigorous masters of High Magick and the Elemental Arts, the many Houses of Hermes study powerful Arts and esoteric Sciences in their quest to perfect the human condition through mastery of Creation as a whole.

• The Society (or “Sons”) of Ether: Graceful saviors of scientific potential, the Etherites delve into strange theories and unconventional machines.

• The Verbenae: Devotees of rough Nature and mystic blood-Arts, these “witch-folk” command primal magicks and pagan refinements of technology.

• The Virtual Adepts, or VAs: Reality-hackers devoted to rebooting their world, the Adepts perfect the political ideals and esoteric uses of information technology.

The Technocratic ConventionsDespite a fearsome (and well-earned) reputation as ruthless

oppressors, the agents of the Technocratic Union strive to unite humanity within a safely controlled technological ideal… under their Enlightened guidance and protection, of course.

• Iteration X: Perfectors of the human machine, these “machine people” combine esoteric cybernetics with industrial precision.

• The New World Order: Custodians of social order and global stability, NWO operatives provide safety and security for the Masses while eliminating Reality Deviants who threaten the human realm.

• The Progenitors: Innovators dedicated to the potential of organic life, these “mad doctors” challenge biological limitation in their quest to rectify nature’s “mistakes.”

• The Syndicate: Masters of the financial realm, social advancement and the power of wealth, these sharp operators understand the true meaning of “value” beyond mere monetary gain.

• The Void Engineers: Courageous and often eccentric operatives, the Engineers explore and protect Earthly and extradimensional space.

Unaligned MagesOther mages and sects – often referred to, disparagingly,

as “orphans” and “crafts” – exist outside of this Ascension War, either because they choose to avoid it, or because they don’t even realize it exists. Mage: The Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition explores the Crafts in greater detail, while this quickstart booklet features a group of “orphans” as a simple introduction

to the complex world of Mage. Even in between the shadows of this existential war, however, the battle for Reality influences the mages who refuse to take part in it.

Characters, and the Things They Can Do

Whether they belong to a faction or take on the world alone, each Mage character shares certain common elements:

• Arete and an Awakened Avatar (or Eidolon) that allows that person to rework reality through knowledge, imagination and Will;

• Certain Traits that reflect your character’s abilities;

• Magick, the talent for changing reality in ways that most people cannot manage. Even when a given character doesn’t consider such talents to be “magical,” the game-term for that ability is still called magick;

• Focus, the combination of belief, practice and instruments that allow your mage to employ magick.

Arete and the AvatarRegardless of her faction or practices, every mage has

Arete (“excellence”) that reflects her enlightenment, and an Awakened Avatar – an “inner self” that helps her channel her knowledge and imagination into magickal acts.

Certain groups, notably the Technocracy, don’t think of such things in mystical terms. They prefer to call Arete Enlightenment, and use the term Eidolon if and when they speak of the “avatar” at all. In game terms, however, it’s all the same thing. For simplicity’s sake, just think of them as Arete and the Avatar for now.

The higher your character’s Arete becomes, the more power she can use when casting spells. A high Avatar simply reflects the power of that mage’s inner self; although the Avatar has a range of other abilities in Mage: The Ascension, we just present the basics here. A low Avatar, then, reflects a faint “presence” within the mage’s mind, while a high Avatar represents a spirit that seems as real – to that mage – as anyone else she knows. Among the characters in this booklet, Chopper has a low Avatar, while Jinx has a very powerful one.

TraitsEach character in Mage has a collection of Attributes (innate

capacities of body, mind, and social savvy), Abilities (Talents, Skills and Knowledges), and Backgrounds (benefits that your character enjoys – friends, allies, financial resources, and so forth). Those Traits represent the in-game capabilities of your mage. Measured in dots – usually along a scale between 1 and 5 – they reflect the character’s relative ability and tell you how many dice to roll when determining what she can do. For each dot in the appropriate Trait, you take one die to determine

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8 Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition Quickstart

your chance of succeeding at a given task. Added together, these dice become your dice pool; the bigger your pool, the greater your ability. For details, see Rules of the Game, below, and the character sheets for the various characters described later in this booklet.

When building your Mage character, you spend certain amounts of points on various Traits. The exact amounts depend upon the Trait in question. A zero-dot rating in a Trait reflects the total absence of that characteristic, while six dots or more in an Ability, Attribute or Background reflects an inhuman degree of expertise. Certain Traits – Arete, Willpower, Quintessence and Paradox – work on a different scale, ranging from 0 to 10. Aside from Willpower, non-mages don’t have these Traits at all. Such large-scale Traits represent the differences between a mage and any other sort of character.

For the majority of your Traits, think of your character’s abilities along this range:

X No Capability

• Poor/ Novice

•• Average/ Beginning Professional

••• Good/ Experienced Professional

•••• Exceptional/ Highly Skilled Professional

••••• World-Class

••••• • Beyond Normal Human Range

Most folks range between 1 and 3 in their various Attributes, and between 0 and 3 in assorted Abilities. For the details involved in character creation, see Mage: The Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition, Chapter Six.

MagickEach mage can perform magick. Whether a given mage

considers it to be magick depends upon his beliefs, but in game

terms, magick is what makes a mage a mage. The specifics can be found below, in the rules about magick. For now, just remember that your mage employs nine Spheres when casting spells; his ability with a given Sphere reflects what he’s able to do with it. You roll your mage’s Arete Trait when using magick, and the better you roll, the more you accomplish.

FocusFocus represents the things your mage does in order to

employ her magick, and is the combination of belief, practice and instruments. Although different groups favor different approaches and disciplines, each mage has a focus that suits that individual’s paradigm – the “model of reality” that reflects her beliefs about life, magick, the universe, and everything.

Essentially, a focus takes the mage’s beliefs, puts them into a practice, and then uses certain instruments to make things happen. Those “instruments” don’t have to be objects, either; a martial artist, for example, can use meditation, physical movements, mental concentration, and sacred teachings as the instruments of her practice.

Let’s take that martial artist as an example: She believes in perfection and transcendence of the self through mastery of physical, mental and metaphysical forces; that’s her paradigm. Her focus would be martial arts, and her instruments, as mentioned earlier, include various types of meditation, strikes and kicks, physical exercise, and so on.

To keep things simple, think of focus this way:

What does the mage believe? = paradigm

How does the mage turn belief into action? = practice

What does the mage use to do so? = instruments

All three combined = focus

Each of the characters in this booklet feature entries about the ways in which those characters focus their magick. For details, see those entries, as well as the Focus and the Arts section in Mage: The Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition, Chapter Ten.

Rules of the GameThe core of Mage’s Storyteller System is simple: Roll one 10-sided die for every dot you have in a Trait or combination of Traits; compare the numbers on those dice to a target number called a difficulty; and then count all the dice that equal or exceed that number. This basic system has a few permutations, but most situations in your Mage chronicle – from wrecking cop cars to cooking a great meal – can be resolved quickly, easily and fairly with the following rules.

Players and StorytellersWithin each Storyteller game, most players take on the roles

of individual characters. One player, though – the Storyteller – essentially becomes the “director” of the story, playing the supporting roles, describing the setting, setting up the conflicts, and resolving the conflicts within your adventure.

Although the Storyteller has a certain degree of power (she’s the one setting up the plot and keeping things in motion, after all), it’s worth remembering that your Storyteller is a player in

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9Rules of the Game

her own right. Ideally, a Mage game is an exercise in collaborative creativity. Each player has at least one role, everyone contributes, and the Storyteller gets to enjoy the game as well. Although some other games feature an adversarial relationship between the “Game Master” and her players, Mage encourages everyone to work together even when their characters are tearing each other apart.

Dice Pools, and Rolling the Dice

As mentioned above, all characters have dice pools that reflect their ability to get things done. Generally, that dice pool comes from combining an Attribute with an Ability (say, Perception + Awareness), although certain situations call for a single Trait (usually Willpower, Arete, a Background, or some other Trait) instead of two of them combined.

Each dot (•) on your character sheet represents one 10-sided die, and the resulting collection of dice becomes your dice pool for that task. Sneaking across a room, for example, would combine Dexterity + Stealth; if your character’s got three dots in Dexterity and four dots in Stealth, then his dice pool would contain seven dice.

DifficultyWhen rolling those dice, you want to equal or exceed the

task’s difficulty number, simply called its difficulty. That difficulty shows how hard it is to accomplish a given task. Easy tasks have low difficulty numbers, while hard ones have higher numbers.

When you roll the dice, you want each die equal or exceed the difficulty number. For example, if that number’s 7, you want to score a 7, 8, 9 or 10 on the dice. Each number that equals or exceeds the difficulty is called a success; the more successes you roll, the better you do. If you don’t roll any dice that exceed the difficulty number, then you fail.

For most tasks, the “default” difficulty number is 6. If there’s not a specific difficulty number mentioned for a given task, then assume that difficulty is 6. The Storyteller always has the final word on the difficulty for a given situation.

Really simple tasks – those rated at difficulty 3 or 4 – don’t usually require a roll unless the consequences of failure are particularly severe (like getting caught using your boss’s computer) or the character in question has very little chance of succeeding at even the simplest task (that is, he has a dice pool lower than four). In most cases otherwise, simply consider the task an automatic success (again, see below.)

A roll of 10 is always a success unless there was no way you could have performed that task to begin with. Not even a 10 will help you shout the moon out of the sky!

For examples for potential tasks and their associated difficulties, see the chart nearby. For further details, see Mage: The Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition, Chapters Eight and Nine.

Difficulty Examples

3 Trivial (hopping a creek)

4 Easy (cooking a meal)

5 Straightforward (changing the oil in your car)

6 Standard (punching someone in the face)

7 Challenging (comprehending a book by Crowley)

8 Difficult (Playing through “2112” on your guitar)

9 Extreme (sealing a multimillion-dollar business deal with reluctant partners involved)

Degrees of Success

One success Marginal (finding a helpful TV Tropes entry)

Two Successes Moderate (getting someone’s cellphone number)

Three Successes Complete (delighting your new playmate with a fresh-cooked breakfast)

Four Successes Exceptional (selling five books to someone who’d come looking for one)

Five or More Successes Phenomenal (writing the 500,000-word anniversary edition of a series you helped create 20 years ago)

Botching and the “Rule of One”There’s also a kind of failure you can’t recover from: the

botch, a catastrophic failure which leaves the character in a worse situation than he was been in before the roll.

Story-wise, a botch reflects spectacular bad luck. Game-wise, every 1 you roll takes away one success on your dice. Call this “the rule of one.” If your 1s cancel out all your successes, then you fail. If you roll three successes, then roll three 1s, you’re left right where you were before.

Assuming that you rolled even one success, even after the 1s cancel out all your successes, then your character simply fails.

But if you don’t roll any successes, and you roll a 1, then you botch.

That’s where things get ugly. A high difficulty makes it harder for you to score a success, and so the odds of a spectacular catastrophe go up as you attempt more challenging feats. If Sabra tries to sneak through the yard in broad daylight (difficulty 9), his chances of getting caught right out in the open (a botch) go way up because he’s not likely to roll any 9s or 10s.

If you roll several 1s, and no successes, then you botch in a big way. A single botch might prove embarrassing, while a three-1s botch could prove fatal. The Storyteller gets the final say, but impressive botches should have impressively terrible results.

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